The guy who made it so difficult to open your bag of potato chips
1–10 of 92 posts
Re: The guy who made it so difficult to open your bag of potato chips
#2I love learning about things I would never come across in everyday life, like how a packing machine works and the problems no one would ever think to think of like air pressure and altitudes. Then also the restrictions put in place and how to come up with a creative solution to a problem. This is the kind of stuff I live for.
Re: The guy who made it so difficult to open your bag of potato chips
#3I think the most interesting part of this post was the comment about how they use multiple scales with chips to get closest to the desired value.
This is really a neat hack that probably allows for much less precise chip dumpers. I'm reminded of how awesome randomized algorithms in CS can seem, but in real life it is just extra magical.
Re: The guy who made it so difficult to open your bag of potato chips
#4I think the most interesting part of this post was the comment about how they use multiple scales with chips to get closest to the desired value. This is really a neat hack that probably allows for much less precise chip dumpers. I'm reminded of how awesome randomized algorithms in CS can seem, but in real life it is just extra magical.
More a case of discrete chip mass.
You could have very accurate chip scales, load cells are cheap and very accurate - but how do you select exact 'N' grams of random sized potato chips?
Having a set of pans, where the first has eg. 17chips with a mass of 4.5g, the next has 19chips with a mass of 5.9g etc and then selecting from 4 of them them to hit the 20g bag size is very clever.
Re: The guy who made it so difficult to open your bag of potato chips
#5Seems like a good design would be to have seals that are extra-weak to shear forces while being strong for all the other kinds.
Re: The guy who made it so difficult to open your bag of potato chips
#6At 4:10 in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkqBbr7Ewsw you can see a VFFS machine in action.
(I find 'how its made' to be musak for nerds but that is a different post :-)
Re: The guy who made it so difficult to open your bag of potato chips
#7Seems like a good design would be to have seals that are extra-weak to shear forces while being strong for all the other kinds.
One type of seal I see has a nick in the side.
It's still sealed, but the nick gives you something to leverage, so you can tear the packet open. Perhaps this isn't as common in the US?
Re: The guy who made it so difficult to open your bag of potato chips
#8Seems like a good design would be to have seals that are extra-weak to shear forces while being strong for all the other kinds.
One type of seal I see has a nick in the side. It's still sealed, but the nick gives you something to leverage, so you can tear the packet open. Perhaps this isn't as common in the US?
It is, though it doesn't always work, and it's easy to tear a sub-optimal opening.
Re: The guy who made it so difficult to open your bag of potato chips
#9so when trucks would drive their chips out to California, some of the seals would open up due to the pressure difference between the high altitude air and the air sealed inside the bag
This is backwards, isn't it? Less dense air from Colorado would shrink the bag in California.
Re: The guy who made it so difficult to open your bag of potato chips
#10so when trucks would drive their chips out to California, some of the seals would open up due to the pressure difference between the high altitude air and the air sealed inside the bag This is backwards, isn't it? Less dense air from Colorado would shrink the bag in California.
Yeah, it is. Your shampoo usually opens on the pass.
At a guess, maybe he meant the plants were east of the mountains, not west, so they would have to drive over them?